Closing The Back Doors
This week, we discuss the linear model as a general purpose tool for conditioning on confounding variables and recovering causal estimands. We will highlight the strengths and limitations of this approach, and show how to estimate the model’s parameters using matrix algebra.

Some three-dimensional plots illustrating the “plane of best fit”.
Next week, we discuss a set of methods that don’t require you to catalogue every possible back door path and close it. Please read up on:
No problem set this week. Enjoy!